 Welcome everyone. I'm Yang Wu, Open Resources Library at Clemson Libraries in Clemson University in South Carolina. Hi, and I'm John Morgenstern and I direct Clemson University Press. And we would like to introduce you to a new Open Educational Resource Publishing Initiative in South Carolina. Our initiative is related to recent trends in developing and managing network information content, transformations in academic libraries and university presses in response to these trends, and infrastructure supporting the creation and distribution of network information. The publishing of OER, which are openly licensed online learning resources that are designed for the 5Rs, free use, retention, distribution, as well as adaptation and revision, is really taking off in recent years. OER are aimed at fostering increased access to learning materials and equity in higher education, and they are a response to the current publishing landscape behind textbooks. The price of textbooks, as you probably know, has been rising dramatically, particularly in the last two decades. According to data from the Department of Education and the Education Data Initiative, an organization that monitors college expenses, textbook prices have increased over 1000% since 1977, with most of the increases coming after 2000. Textbook prices have increased at a rate that's three times higher than inflation between 2006 and 2016. And they are the highest rising college expense for students, including even the rate of tuition increases during the same period. Students now pay up to 400 for textbooks in their courses, and every new edition of a textbook now costs on average 12% higher than the previous edition. A reason for this is the increasingly monopolistic nature of the textbook publishing industry, with five large publishers controlling about 80% of the U.S. textbook publishing market, and it is having a major financial and psychological impact on students. Studies by research bodies such as USPIRG and StudentWatch have found that up to two-thirds of students in their surveys either don't purchase textbooks or delay purchasing them to the detriment of their grades and that large numbers of students either take drastic action to purchase textbooks, such as skipping meals or are prevented from taking certain courses or even going into certain majors due to high textbook prices. Low income and underrepresented minority students are particularly affected. Textbook publishing and distribution have increasingly moved into the realm of network informational content in the last five years, and it has the potential to dramatically improve or worsen the quality of education for students. Textbook prices, as you probably see from this chart here, have actually gone down since 2016. This is due to two factors. One is that publishers are increasingly moving from a model of selling hard-copied textbooks to having students purchase subscriptions to online textbooks on a semester-by-semester basis. They also begin to offer inclusive access, arrangements where students could receive a major textbook discount if their institutions made textbook costs a part of student fees which are collected by publishers. These developments significantly reduced textbook prices and eliminated the hassles of students shopping around for textbooks. They are also well-suited to online learning, and students at higher educational institutions have increasingly embraced them during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there's a catch to these arrangements. e-textbook subscriptions are eliminating the used textbook market, which offers students lower textbook prices. Inclusive access is also eliminating the options that students have when purchasing textbooks and making them more dependent on publishers. e-textbook subscriptions have become a new way for publishers to ensnare students, and they are jacking up subscription prices, which went up 23% since last fall. Students through e-textbook subscriptions are also no longer retaining personal copies of textbooks, which can negatively affect their learning. OER publishing and the use of OER is the other factor that has been driving down textbook prices, and it is a much more positive solution. OER are completely free for students. They can be downloaded for long-term use, and students can also print them if they want. Openly licensed, these resources also allow instructors' creativity to modify an OER textbook, to fit their teaching needs, and even to create new textbooks out of different parts of other OER textbooks. Academic libraries have taken the lead in OER publishing in recent years. This is because they support faculty from a variety of disciplines and can help to promote new information on campuses. Librarians also have a lot of expertise in areas such as copyright, metadata, and making resources discoverable, which can be applied to publishing and promoting OER. OER publishing is a part of larger expansion of library services into online open publishing, which led to the creation of larger library associations supporting publishing, like the Library Publishing Coalition, and many academic libraries have merged with university presses in recent years to support OER publishing. However, there are many issues behind OER publishing by libraries. Though many libraries and librarians have skills that can support publishing, they often lack expertise in actual publishing skills, such as copy editing, design, typesetting, peer review, etc. These activities are essential to creating high quality textbooks that can compete with commercial textbooks, and they are the key to the future viability of OER. University press and library mergers are addressing this issue, but these mergers tend to be mainly in larger universities and end up producing OER for these institutions rather than the needs of smaller institutions. Funding OER development is also very expensive. While some groups, like the Rebus community and the Open Education Network, are offering training to libraries on OER publishing, they do not offer funding to support OER. Government funding for OER publishing has increased dramatically recently in the US, but a lot of this funding is only in certain states of the US. Libraries in many other states, such as our state, often lack funding for OER publishing. OER publishing also requires libraries and university presses to hire dedicated staff, which also has a cost and is also the issue of making textbooks visible to faculty. While the OER community has many online portals for distributing OER, faculty are often unfamiliar with them or unaccustomed to visiting these websites. Our initiative is an effort to address all these issues. Dr. Morgenstern, can you please elaborate on what our initiative is and what it includes? Thank you, Dr. Wu. So essentially what we did together is establish a dedicated imprint to publish OER. This brings together the expertise of Clemson University Press, the only university press that is organizationally structured within a library and one of the key research institutions in the state, and we've partnered with the state's library consortia, Pascal, partnership among South Carolina academic libraries and their affordable learning initiative, which is called SCALE. The original inspiration for the imprint is the University of North Georgia Press's Vanguard partnership with affordable learning Georgia. Essentially affordable learning Georgia offers two different tiers of grants. One is a transformational grant or a continuous improvement grant. The transformational grant allows individuals or whole departments to move toward OER and to create OER. So it might be a department that is looking to dispense with commercial textbooks altogether and they need resources in order to facilitate the transition. It may be an individual faculty member looking to develop a high impact OER and they can apply for a transformation grant. A continuous improvement grant allows to update an OER or tailor an existing OER for the state of Georgia. This really trailblazing partnership at the University of North Georgia Press with affordable learning Georgia essentially means that the press guarantees to recipients of the materials grant publishing services, which include peer review, professional editing, layout, development, copyright review, all of the kind of expertise that typically is lacking in the process in order to produce a high quality book that competes with commercial alternatives. The program has been very successful. They have published more than 20 OER already, 16 funded through affordable learning Georgia. They have some other partnerships to build their lists and the University of North Georgia is currently working to develop nine organizational leadership textbooks which will eliminate commercial textbook purchases for all students in that major. So it's something to aspire to for us in South Carolina to develop a major that does not require students to shell out for textbooks. So why Clemson University Press? So Clemson University Press is the only University Press that reports within a library in the state of South Carolina and it is again at one of the flagship research institutions in the state. So there's that we are part of a broader team of information professionals who bring some of that expertise in terms of distribution metadata, but also relationship with faculty teaching and who are researching. So it brings together the right mix of inter-institutional infrastructure with the expertise of the press. The press was recently along with the University of North Georgia Press made an association University Press's member, which essentially means that we meet all the highest standards for publishing and a fixing our seal on a book or the fact that we're publishing it guarantees a certain level of quality. I often get the question, why a dedicated imprint? What does an imprint mean? An imprint is essentially a way of branding a part of a publisher's list to collect it all in one place so that you know that this group, this subset of books are related in some way. Our textbooks, for instance, in this case. Major publishers have these, so Simon and Schuster has an imprint called Scribner and it does more kind of literary publishing versus the rest of their list. This separation of the OER into a dedicated imprint allows for some flexibility in branding but it also allows for a joint ownership over the imprint. So each of these books will be branded with scale so that every affiliate institution can feel a sense of ownership over this project which is operationalized through the State's Library Consortium. So the first challenge was figuring out how do we structure the imprint. So the very obvious thing as Clemson University Press can operationalize. We have the expertise to publish books. We also rely on partnerships and creative financial models in order to make sure that books are published and reach a broad audience which might mean applying to grants, it might mean all kinds of things. And so we have that expertise at Clemson but what's lacking is what Pascal can provide which is some seed funding to help us cover some of the initial costs that we would outsource traditionally in copy editing typesetting, that sort of thing. But it also brings to the imprint a statewide network of relationships between institutions, between libraries and the faculty they support who will ultimately write these books and also use them in their teaching. And they also manage a digital infrastructure for, you know, catalog or for instance Clemson University Libraries catalog runs on a system that is shared by the state. So they will help us in order to make sure by leveraging that digital infrastructure that each of these OER appear in their catalogs, are prominent, are discoverable by faculty and students alike. This is a project that is a community based project. It involves lots of people. And so we ultimately decided that we would have two different kinds of boards helping us move it along. The first is going to be an advisory board. Those are those higher level administrators, provost, Chancellor's Deans. And those are going to be some people who are going to help us with strategic guidance thinking about how we might move forward helping us think about broader funding models and just their support conferred upon publishing OER, adopting OER, using OER will help make sure that faculty are more receptive to using OER, publishing OER, dedicating their research time to do that kind of thing. And then an editorial board of affordable learning coordinators who are really the boots on the ground, they work locally with their faculty. They know which courses require the most money on behalf of the students. So we're going to work with them in order to solicit proposals and to ensure that faculty adopt the books that are published in the imprint. And really they'll be the on the ground boots on the ground champions, but they'll have a seat at the central table. So another challenge here to any kind of imprint that doesn't have the doesn't have the sales revenue that's projected through a traditional publishing model and doesn't have the benefit of a grant program as robust as affordable learning Georgia's is that we need to think a little bit creatively in terms of long term sustainable funding. So I just wanted to share some ideas of how we intend to grow the imprint over time. The first three imprint publications are going to be robotics OER published using funding from a major national grant to the Department of Education. And Dr. Wu is going to talk about that momentarily. We think that these proofs of concepts will position us very well to apply for additional national grants. We think that those individual institutions, once they're at the table, they'll see the value. The advisory board members can help with development or maybe we can piece together some funding. And there's also occasionally grant programs through Pascal that can bring additional revenue or resources. This multi institutional authorship model where there might be authors working at three different institutions together on a textbook means that we could draw on small pockets of funds that are already available at each of those institutions to cover those base costs. We also think that there's a possibility that the commission of higher standards in South Carolina would be interested in funding the imprint as a key piece of infrastructure to support a major initiative to increase the number of degree holders in the state and make sure that we have a workforce that's trained to meet the needs of a growing economy. Student government support. Let's save them money. Invest in us. We'll save you money. Development initiatives and folks who want to support the university usually actually want to support the students and the student experience. And this is one way, one very clear and obvious way that they can have impact. And you know, there are other creative solutions where there's tiny pools of money around the university like lab bees that can be used to underwrite the course text. And now I'm going to pass it on to Dr. Wu to talk about the first projects in the imprint. Thank you, Dr. Morgenstern. So our project is called Cold Dream OER. And what it is, is an initiative to develop three textbooks on robotics in advanced engineering and in demand industry in South Carolina. And it is designed to support the needs of a variety of institutions in the state from those offering two-year associate programs to undergraduate and graduate degrees. And it has been awarded close to $760,000 by the U.S. Department of Education under its open textbook pilot program. And it is a statewide initiative involving Claflin University and HBCU in the state, trident the largest technical college in South Carolina, as well as a research institution like Clemson University. The project also has the backing of local employers such as BMW, ABB Robotics. And it is supported by the South Carolina Department of Commerce, as well as Pascal. So this project began in September of 2021 with the aim of producing three textbooks within a three-year period. Dr. Morgenstern, can you further explain the connections between this project and our imprint? Yeah, so this major project with its funding and expertise that it brings to the table will allow us to launch the imprint in the most impactful way possible, which is to say that it is going to provide some really impressive proofs of concept. We highly funded OER that benefit from multiple constituents in industry and at institutions of higher education across the state and researchers who specialize in things like educational design and course design are contributing their expertise to this project. So the research and the books themselves will lend themselves to further growth. We also will design a template for the first three OER based on usability testing, which is part of the project and funded through that template will then be used in order to make sure that each OER produced in the imprint is developed to maximize student learning. So it will be based on how students learn using the print and digital text. It will also provide a model for that institutional educational OER authorship. In other words, this project isn't just one, you know, one R1 institution that is developing a textbook for an R1 institution. But it brings together multiple institutions that offer different degree programs from undergraduate and associate bachelors to graduate degrees. And so it will give us a model for textbooks at each of those levels in order to see how we might modify in the future and OER in order to tailor it to different levels of degree programs. And it also introduces multiple key stakeholders from across the state, including folks at Pascal, individual institutions and their faculty, state agencies, key industry partner, and potentially through the advisory board, even key administrators and the mission on higher education. So this major project will help us launch the imprint in a big way in order to make sure that the imprint has long and lasting impact. Thank you, everyone. Here's our contact information and our work site.